Investigation of Orthogonal Wavelets in the Damage Detection of the Wind Turbine Tower with Soil-Structure Interaction

Wind energy is one of the most hopeful renewable energy sources that is also growing. The wind turbine tower supports the complete wind turbine system, and its damage may cause catastrophic failure of the wind turbine. However, the background to the study of the health monitoring of the wind turbine tower against its mechanical installations is insignificant. Besides, no comprehensive research has been conducted on the health monitoring of the tower with soil-structure interaction included. In this article, the extensive analysis of the multilevel 2D wavelet decomposition approach using orthogonal wavelets and soil-structure interaction is performed numerically. The established finite element model is calibrated and verified with the NREL 5-MW reference onshore wind turbine. Then, while defining several damage scenarios, the 3-dimensional modes of the finite element model of the damaged structure were investigated using the proposed method. The findings imply that the quality of the damage detection in the soil-structure interaction models has increased, generally.